This week’s Monday Morning Brew playlist (listen links at the end) features some choice selections. It opens to a carefree rolling, The Old Man and Me, taken from Ry Cooder’s third album, Okie, released in 1974.
In contrast, Brion Gysin, a close friend of William S Burroughs (they both used a cut-up technique), feels like it arrived from another planet. Gysin was nearly 70 when he made Junk. Recorded in early-80s Paris with producer Ramuntcho Matta, he pulls in Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, and members of French post-punk groups Modern Guy and Suicide Romeo. On various tracks, Gysin repeats and rearranges his own phrases like a man still cutting up text with a blade. He’s funny, abrasive, and dying of cancer. Wewantsounds reissued it in 2024. A Beat connection emerges later in the playlist with a track from Arthur Russell, a close friend of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
Other notable playlist moments include Japan, from Pharoah Sanders’ Tauhid album, recorded in November 1966, four days after playing a concert with Coltrane at Temple University. It was his first record for Impulse! and it sounds like someone stepping out from behind someone else’s shadow. The band — Sonny Sharrock on guitar (his first time on record), Dave Burrell on piano, Henry Grimes on bass — is rawer and more unpredictable than the groups Sanders would use later. Sanders would go on to make Karma, which most people point to first, but Tauhid is the less comfortable record and maybe the better one for it.
It’s always a pleasure to include Bex Burch. There is Only Love and Fear was one of my favourite albums of 2023. The opening track Dawn Blessings beckons spring. Thomas Blake notes in his KLOF Mag review that it begins with a recording of birdsong before the gyil – with almost luminous clarity – directly echoes the familiar cuckoo (a bird, mirroring Burch’s own flight paths, that spends its time between west Africa and northern Europe). The song grows with evocative bowed strings and woodwind, and a bassline that teeters and begins to explore like an animal newly foaled in the woods.
Amongst the more recent releases are Dozen Roses from Birds of Paradise by Thomas Dollbaum, out May 22, 2026, via Dear Life Records and Die Young by Kevin Morby from his forthcoming new album, Little Wide Open, on Dead Oceans.
Also notable, and an album recommendation, is Irreparable Parables, the latest offering from Andrew Wasylyk. Wasylyk makes instrumental records, mostly — slow, textured pieces built from old keyboards and strings in a room full of half-working gear in Dundee. Irreparable Parables is different because he invited singers in. Six of them, recording remotely, sending vocals back like postcards. One standout, included in this week’s playlist, is “Spectators in the Absence of God” (at the heart of the album alongside ‘Love Is A Life That Lasts Forever’ ft. Molly Linen), sung by Kathryn Joseph. It sits with the feeling of watching terrible things happen to other people from a safe distance — the guilt and helplessness that comes with that. Wasylyk notes: “The cracked tenderness of her voice is spellbinding.”
Listen Links for this playlist are available via our Substack (sign-up to receive it in your inbox every week):